Ellen de Bruijne Projects proudly presents the new work Toxic by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz. The artists' work revisits documents from the past, photographs, and films, researching the history of erased or illegible “queer” moments. Through their films and installations, the artists appropriate historical images to allow a displacement or a skewing of authority, and the means that lead to such knowledge.

These questions are at the heart of their new project Toxic, which will take the form of an installation with film, devised in collaboration with the performers Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch, and a seminar, which was produced at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and presented as part of the La Triennale in Paris. The discourse ontoxicity installs violent hierarchies between normal and non-normal/queer bodies, between abled bodies and nonabled bodies, between “us” and “strangers”,middle-class bodies and working-class bodies. And what happens if another technology and its history (film camera and images instead of chemical substances) is focused from a perspective of toxicity? While the cinematic apparatus tries to allow for unmediated objectivity and knowledge about “stranger danger” (Sara Ahmed, 2000), it might—as dirty and uncanny by-products— also produce ec/static bodies and queer connections.

Toxic arises from Boudry and Lorenz’s interest in the performances of Jack Smith and the “Theater of the Ridiculous” in the 1960s and 1970s, which formulated an anarchic and outrageous critique of capitalism and normal bodies, by integrating selfreferential aspects into his stage shows.

On September 23rd at 6PM Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz will give a lecture at the gallery on their new work Toxic. Afterwards there will be an Q&A with the artists.